12/30/2011

An island is born in the Red Sea

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite
captures what appears to be a plume of smoke from a new island

Underwater volcanic activity has pushed an
previously unseen island to the surface in a remote part of the Red
Sea.

Fishermen witnessed spewing lava fountains reaching up to 90ft
tall on December 19 near the group of islands known as the Zubair Group, off the
west coast of Yemen.

Days later images released by NASA Earth Observatory show the underwater explosion
seems to have created a new island in between the Rugged and Haycock islands.

Running in a roughly northwest-southeast line, the Zubair
islands poke above the sea surface, rising from a shield volcano.

It is not yet clear how big or if the landmass
created will be a permanent fixture of the
Zubair Group of islands. A Nasa spokesman said: 'The Advanced Land
Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite captured these high-resolution,
natural-color images on December 23, 2011 , and October 24, 2007.

'The image from December 2011 shows an
apparent island where there had previously been an unbroken water surface.

'A thick plume rises from the island, dark
near the bottom and light near the top, perhaps a mixture of volcanic ash and
water vapor.'

According to the NASA Earth Observatory
website, the existing ten islands poke above the sea surface, rising from a
shield volcano. And as this region is part of the Red Sea Rift
where the African and Arabian tectonic plates pull apart and new ocean crust
regularly forms, eruptions are not thought to be unheard of but because of the
remote location, they are rarely discovered.

Nearby Jabal al-Tair volcanic island erupted
unexpectedly in 2007, after 124 years of inactivity, killing 8 people, as well
as the volcanoes of the Afar Triagle in Eritrea and Ethiopia and the volcanic
fields of southern Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

An underwater eruption in Magma created a new
Canary Island in November.

At just 70 metres from the surface the volcano
and islanders are still trying to come up with a name for the new island.
It is quite close to El Hierro and geologists
feared if it continued to erupt it could eventually meet up with the
mainland.